The histories of a city: Portland and the Halprin plazas

Lawrence HalprinLawrence Halprin's drawing of the Halprin plazas, from "Where the Revolution Began." One of the civic contributions of my former colleague Randy Gragg is his "re-discovery" of the string of Lawrence Halprin plazas and fountains in the South Auditorium District that start at Keller Fountain and move steadily south to the small Source Fountain.

Gragg has restored Halprin, the great American landscape architect, to the city's present tense through his columns when he was at The Oregonian; a smart, lush new book ("Where the Revolution Began"); and a series of events and exhibitions. The highlight of the events was "The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin," which animated the plazas in 2008 with dance, music and a throng of spectators who followed the show to each Halprin site.

Why did these lovely plazas need rediscovering (and preserving) in the first place? Why didn't we recognize their greatness before Gragg asked us to have a new look at them?

The answer lies in Portland's complex and dynamic politics of the 1960s and the city planning ideals that shaped the South Auditorium District, including the 1950s concept that the path to civic improvement needs to be paved and have four lanes.

That idea led the city to scrape clean two "decaying" neighborhoods, South Portland and the neighborhood along North Williams Ave., and replace them with the city's first two major urban renewal projects, Memorial Coliseum and the South Auditorium District. We would now consider those moves mistakes -- even though they produced two remarkable civic projects, the Coliseum and the Halprin plazas -- because they displaced thousands of people and because they failed to create the lively urban areas that cities depend on for their lifeblood. We are still dealing with the Rose Quarter, and only the expansion of Portland State University down to Southwest Fourth Avenue has begun to slightly enliven the South Auditorium District.

The reaction against this mass-scale urban renewal and the city's plans to do the same in other "decaying" inner-ring neighborhoods generated the city's neighborhood association movement and led to the city's current working model -- a collection of livable neighborhoods connected by mass transit.

The neighborhoods won; we developed a new city philosophy and a new set of political leaders. The plan for 50 miles of new freeways through close-in Portland neighborhoods was abandoned, and so was the razing of Lair Hill.

However, the South Auditorium District remained, a testament to "modern" urban planning in the 1940s and '50s. When I first moved to the city in the late 1970s, my walk to work led me through those Halprin plazas. They were nearly always empty, walled off from the rest of the city by pleasant residential towers. Keller Fountain (then the Forecourt Fountain) was used by many, but not the Lovejoy, Pettygrove or Source plazas.

Neglected, they fell into disrepair, the state in which Gragg found them, and understanding their significance to the history of public spaces both in Portland and nationally, he resolved to save them. He's now a board member of the Halprin Landscape Conservancy.

Before urban renewal, South Portland was no more "decaying" than neighborhoods that are thriving now, such as Sunnyside or Clinton or Mississippi. South Portland had been the home of several waves of immigrants to the city -- Jewish, Italian and Japanese -- but according to Abbott, the declining area was seen as a threat to central city business interests. And city planning doctrine at the time maintained that once a neighborhood had begun to decline it was destined to deteriorate completely.

Now, we would consider the area block by block, even building by building. We might provide tax incentives to save some of the structures -- we've gotten really good at our historic renovations in Portland -- or replace them with congenial new buildings. We understand that successful urban neighborhoods are busy with commerce, accidental meetings and recreation at the street level -- like South Portland might have been.

The Oregon Jewish Museum and curator Tim DuRoche will revisit South Portland in "The Shape of Time," the first exhibit at the museum's new space, 1953 N.W. Kearney St., which opens to the public Dec. 20. The show intends to update the past in the context of our present needs, activating memories of the past with historical and present-day photographs.

As Gragg suggests, though, our stories and memories belong to various histories, they are contradictory, they refuse to be pinned down. Which is why they are endlessly useful to the present.

Say we had applied today's urban planning doctrines to South Portland. Would we have had the gift of Halprin's plazas and fountains, and the other public spaces built in the same spirit -- Pioneer Courthouse Square and Jamison Square? Sometimes history just laughs at us when we try to make it tell just one story.